Your Musical Brain

Music is more than an acoustic signal. It is more than vibration transmitted through the air. It activates large areas of the brain that evoke associations and emotions. Furthermore, it is possibly rooted in a kind of pre-verbal communication, which use is hugely beneficial to our mental health.

Probably every single person in the world has ever experienced the shivers, or has been able to feel terror, emotion, or love while listening to a determined song. Nowadays, neuroscientists agree that listening to music is a far more complex experience than simply receiving a set of physical stimulations. Harmony and melody stimulate your brain in ways you cannot even imagine. Some experts even believe music makes you smart.

So music stimulates the brain in many ways: If someone, for example, had piano lessons and then listened to a piano concerto by Beethoven, some areas in the motor cortex are more active, enhancing every single process related to movement.

How does this happen? First of all, music consists of sounds or, expressed physically, of vibrations caused by subtle changes in the air pressure. In the ear, such mechanical stimulus is transformed into a neural signal that makes its way to the auditory cortex, generating the wonderful variety of sounds we call music. It is there where magic begins. Our brain seems to be able to distinguish and appreciate music among all other sounds, being stimulated in the process and enhancing its performance over time.